illustrated journal

Archive for April, 2009

I’m back to Switzerland again, after a day-long trip with my parents a week ago. Now cars drive on the right side of the road, people speak French, and my apartment is comfortable. It takes time to adjust each time I move from one country to the other, but I could get used to it and feel at ease with the regular change of scene. It helps separate my time into shorter units and gives each of them a particular taste. On the other hand, I don’t decide when I leave, which means that it can occur at inappropriate times. I miss some of the extravagance you find in England, in comparison with which Switzerland can seem completely dull. The Boho café, for instance, can’t be matched here, nor is there any equivalent for English girls’ flashy clubbing outfits. But after all Pickle lives here, and home is where your hamster is, so I’ll stay until my exams.

My parents are visiting this week. We went to Bath for a couple of days and will drive back home to Switzerland tomorrow. It’s been a busy and enjoyable week, and I appreciated the transition between the end of term and the spring break. Parents can be tricky business, though. Take your eyes off them for one second and they’ll drop their iPhone in the river, stop the car on a roundabout, or let all the things you had carefully arranged in a box fall down the stairs. However, there are good times, and restaurant’s been on them this week, which allowed for a few tasty discoveries, so let’s not be too hard on them.

These last weeks I’ve been writing a lot: every day, most of the day, day after day. I was in my room writing as other students played football outside or chatted for hours, spreading blankets on the grass. I was in my room writing as they started packing one after the other, and left noisily. It started on Wednesday last week, and increased each day before Easter; I could hear suitcases rolling on the Parkwood paths, more and more frequently as time went by and my word count went up. Now the place looks almost deserted when I walk around the houses, observing the plastic bags which float in the wind from high tree branches, like flags for consumerism. And still I go back to my room, and write.